Pay money and have a fair chance of getting a seat I'm not happy with? No thanks.
You mean, make the most money? Nobody cares about making customers happy.
> Well if you get assigned bad seats you might not come back, for this sort of thing I would say happy customers would lead back into more money
There's a lot of space between making customers so unhappy they never return and making them happy. The smart capitalist will eagerly trade the happiness if his customers for more profit, so long as he doesn't hit a tipping point that destroys his business.
But they spent less money.
So Walmart put everything back the way it was.
I feel this goes on a lot in retail as well, eg music in clothing stores. Also Ikea with its mazes and the milk always being at the furthest end of the supermarket.
As someone who is quite sensitive to such uncomfortable situations, I'm at the end of the bell curve that finds the whole experience so unpleasant that I just avoid stores mostly.
A similar but less malicious case would be one of organising the seating on a train or in a cinema, but rather then biasing against families, biasing against other, unrelated groups.
For example - in a cinema, you usually do not wish to sit right beside another group when the rest of the seats are free. Still, you don't want to be that far from the center.
How do you design an algorithm for this? How will it scale? How can you make the most number of groups happy with their seats? How do you avoid having individual seats that nobody wants?